This year it was my great pleasure and honor to have conceived and contributed my biweekly column, SF Lives, to The San Francisco Examiner. The basic idea behind the installments is to profile everyday people who live and work in the most expensive city in the US yet manage to make a difference in the lives of their fellows. The larger concept is to point toward how our lives as San Franciscans intersect, despite our specific neighborhood identities. Here in the highly-touted progressive and diverse San Francisco, we are too often insulated and in essence segregated by divides of race, class and sexual orientation. But those who live here long enough or adapt accordingly become adept at crossing our permeable neighborhood distinctions to become interconnected citizens of one city. It’s a micro-cosmic thing, and not always easy to navigate or articulate, though as Tamara Walker explained it, “If you stay here long enough, you’ll meet everybody.” A diagram, or one of those New Yorker style maps might include Downtown, the Mission, Hayes Valley, Ocean Beach, and “everywhere else.” But for the rest of us, life happens in the Excelsior, the Richmond and the Sunset, the Ingleside and Sunnyside Districts. There is still more life in the Fillmore and the Haight and in the Western Addition, Glen Park and Crocker-Amazon. Japantown, Chinatown the Tenderloin, the Bayview, Potrero Hill…all of it, San Francisco, all of us San Franciscans. I invite you read today’s column on coop business advocate and musician Howard Ryan and catch up on past columns: Read all about the lives of some of my favorite San Franciscans, from seamstress and office worker Rita LaForce and poet/movement worker, Tongo Eisen-Martin to painter and cultural organizer Anna Lisa Escobedo and HIV/AIDS activist Mike Shriver.

And thank you to all the faithful readers of SFLives and of this space: To you, I wish the best for the final days of 2018 and raise a toast for a joyful 2019.

(All photos in this post were taken by Kevin Hume for The San Francisco Examiner, 2018. Pictured from top left to right: Tongo Eisen-Martin, Howard Ryan, Rita LaForce, Mike Shriver and Anna Lisa Escobedo).